Our New Training Service Winds Up Teaching Us Many Lessons Too

We use a model at Trade-Ideas that separates into 8 specific steps the path our customers take to first become aware of our decision support tools all the way to experiencing value (translated = making money) and continuing their subscription. One of the steps along the way is training and its been a hard step to help our customers climb given our limited resources and entire focus on developing Trade-Ideas PRO and The Odds Maker. Recently we made progress on this front by hiring a Director of Education and Training and making all of the partners accountable for customer training.

If you are a customer and would like a personal demonstration of all the ways these tools can assist your trading, please schedule a time with a quick email to: tradeideassupport@gmail.com or info@trade-ideas.com.

I’m happy to say many customers now schedule specific times with our Director, Jamie Hodge, and come away with a better understanding of our tool as well as the way they trade. We know this is working and having extremely positive results with our customers. Here is an example.

Over this Memorial Weekend I’ll be sharing in piecemeal a lengthy testimonial from one of our customers whose story contains several powerful lessons on how traders must continually educate themselves and what the effect of a helpful hand (from a mentor, educator, or software repesentative) can have on a trader’s results.

Meet Rick B.:

Dear Trade Ideas,

I am writing this to you partly to exercise some catharsis for my own benefit and partly to share my insights with the rest of the trading world to whatever extent this happens.

I have been trading for approximately 11 years professionally. I started with the old SOES firms back in the 1990’s and have every since transitioned my game to follow the trends that help me make money.

I am also a chartist. I use to use eSignal, and have since switched to TradeStation to do more automation.

About 2 years ago a friend of mine who was trading out of New Jersey told me about a neat little scanner that was helping him find some opportunities. I took a look at your software and honestly was not really impressed. You see at the time there was a ton of money to be made on the old “Bullet” band wagon. For those that don’t know what that is it really does not matter but for those that do and I know there are plenty of them, you know exactly what I am talking about.

My instinct was if it is not broken why fix it so I continued to do what was making me money. Not necessarily a bad thing, unless you look through the window in hind sight and realize how short sighted the human instinct can really be.

Nevertheless when the bullet game died I needed to figure out what I was going to do next. So, in considering my self a fairly savvy individual, I dove into the TradeStation with both feet. It is a power piece of software and I thought for sure I would be able to find the patterns I needed to pull cash out of the market. I spent time working with indicators and creating my own. MACD crossovers, ADX, DMI, Kelter, Wilder, Stochastic and RSI hybrids, Parabolics, I mean I was in deep. I started doing more back testing and fine tuning some indicator systems and applying them to my trading.

What transpired was somewhat disappointing but ultimately eye opening. It took me 3 weeks to design a system to trade my favorite NYSE stock. The back testing showed that I was right on the money in terms of what I had designed. When I started to trade the system the results really never came close to the results from my back testing. I was frustrated.

So as it happens I was chatting with my buddy from New Jersey as I do from time to time and he started telling me about Trade-Ideas again and a new add on that you guys had released called the Odds Maker. Again I was a little skeptical from my not so great experience with TradeStation and back testing. However this time I though that at least I would take a look.

I believe what happened next happens all the time probably and it is for that reason that I wanted to share this whole story. I signed up for Trade-Ideas and looked over the product. What I found was that it was really lacking most of the technical indicators that I thought were necessary to build a good system. No MACD, no DMI, no Stochastics. I had been using a stochastic system in TradeStation and that is what I had the most experience with. So I emailed Trade-Ideas as a customer and asked them why they don’t add Stochastics as it is commonly used by so many technicians. I said I am looking for a certain stochastic pattern and would like to be notified in real-time when that pattern takes place. I liked the fact that Trade-Ideas watched all the stocks, surely if they could just add the indicator that I needed we would have a marriage made in heaven.

The Trade-Ideas guys sent me an interesting email. They asked me how I know that the stochastics indicator I was looking at really worked. At first I was taken a back by the question. What do you mean how did I know it works? I tested these out in TradeStation and I also was trading this set up……….I started to have this funny feeling. I realized that in reality I did not really know if that set up worked well or not. It back tested fine but really I had not had great results in trying to trade the set up.

Sunday’s post will discuss what happened during the training session that followed and will include some screenshots and actual set-ups used by Rick B.